The Mother’s Word: Maternity and Writing in Walter Scott

This study investigates the startling yet often hidden connection between maternity and writing in Scott’s novels. Within the context of problematised or absent depictions of maternity, and fraught anxieties surrounding the authority of and the ability to narrate narratives textually, this article explores how the connection between these two discourses raises further tensions. The article opens by drawing from scholarly work on the role of writing and orality, and the presentation of maternity and gender, to explore how the two are connected. By developing current scholarship in this area, and by offering close textual readings of Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Monastery, this article concludes that whilst orality may be connected to females more generally, writing is the domain of women who fulfil Romantic ideologies of maternity. The article then proceeds to argue that the relationship between maternity and writing raises further anxieties about the position of textual narrative.